In general, banks play a growth-enhancing role for the real economy. However, distorted incentives of banks, depositors, and regulators around bank insolvency may corrupt banks' credit allocation and monitoring decisions, leading to suboptimal real economic outcomes. A rules-based prompt...

This paper outlines relatively easy to implement reforms for the supervision of transnational banking-groups in the E.U. that should not be primarily based on legal form but on the actual risk structures of the pertinent financial institutions. The proposal also aims at paying close attention to...

The authority of government officials to define and eliminate “unsafe and unsound” banking practices is one of the oldest and broadest powers in U.S. banking law. But this authority has been neglected in the recent literature, in part because of a movement in the 1990s to convert many...

This is a chapter for a forthcoming volume Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press 2014) (eds. Eilís Ferran, Niamh Moloney, and Jennifer Payne). It provides an overview of EU financial regulation from the first banking directive up until its most recent developments in...

This paper identifies the main dimensions of capital regulation. We use survey data from 142 countries from the World Bank's (2013) database covering various aspects of bank regulation. Using multiple explorative factor analysis, we identify two main dimensions of capital regulation: complexity...

Following the Paris Agreement and pursuant to its objective of reordering financial flows to ensure climate change mitigation and adaptation, green finance has become a legislative priority for the European Union. This was illustrated by a unique, albeit limited, change in the mandate of the...

In this paper, I suggest that the regulation of the financial system, especially if the aim is to prevent financial crises, should be focused on dealing with the consequences of the crises, not on trying to avoid their causes, although it may seem counterintuitive at first sight. Contrary to the...

This paper contributes to the debate on the adequate regulatory treatment of non-bank financial intermediation (NBFI). It proposes an avenue for regulators to keep regulatory arbitrage under control and preserve sufficient space for efficient financial innovation at the same time. We argue for a...

The use of contractual engineering to create channels of credit intermediation outside of the realm of banking regulation has been a recurring activity in Western financial systems over the last 50 years. After the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, this phenomenon, at that time commonly...

Reforms of financial regulation after the crisis of 2007-2009 raise the question of what is the relation between financial regulators and competition authorities. Should competition authorities play a role in financial regulation? Should they co-operate with financial regulators? Or should they...